White Water Rafting

On Sunday, I woke up to meet up with my fellow AIFS students to go white water rafting. This trip was originally not included in our program fees, but our resident director used some extra money from the account to pay for each and every one of us to go rafting. The bus ride was a little over two hours. We stopped at a typical Costa Rican restaurant for gallo pinto, fresh fruit, and eggs for breakfast overlooking the Irazu volcano. We continued to drive to the river put in where we met with our guides. We were divided into several rafts with five students a piece and one guide. The guide chose the two strongest people in the group to sit in the front, because they would have to paddle through the waves and be able to withstand getting hit with "walls of water." So, of course, my friend Tom and I were chosen to sit in the front of our raft.

We went to Rio Pacuare which is rated one of the top ten best rivers in the world for white water rafting. It was rather scenic, and it was surrounded by environmentally protected lands that were used as both national parks and as land for indigenous peoples. We were able to see many of the indigenous dwellings, as well as people washing in the river. There were even a few places where the indigenous had built lines with baskets to cross the river when it is higher. On both sides we were surrounded by untouched tropical rain forest and rock formations. The sky was a clear blue, and we were able to hear the sounds of tropical birds and monkeys even over the roar of the river.


We hit a couple of calm part where are guide let us out to swim around in the river. Apparently the crocodiles are more afraid of us than we are of them... We were also given lunch on the river. The guides gave us fresh watermelon and pineapple, and we were able to make our own burritos out of chicken, lettuce, tomotoes, avocado, pepper jack cheese, etc. It was really good. Of course, the day was not all fun and games... We had to paddle our way through dozens and dozens of rapids class two through five. The rapid classification system only goes to five. A class six rapid would pretty much be a waterfall. We had to follow a number of commands to keep us safe, and we kept our feet in special places in the boat to help us from falling out. We were one of the only boats that did not have any people fall out, and we were quite proud of it. In fact, our instructor gave us the option of going through the class five rapids. During one of the class three rapids, he let us all try to jump or stand up and dance. It was a really great time!